**POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING**

Unless he has deviated wildly from his scriptment from '94 or so what you have seen so far is just the setup. The overall story is more complex and vears into more hard sci-fi territory with a revelation along the lines of Solaris; or even more precisely, Robert Charles Wilson's Bios.

[SPOILERS]

The movie is supposed to be 30% live action and 70% photorealistic CG. The story (if it sticks to the old 1990's scriptment) is about a research station on an incredibly biodiverse and seemingly hostile planet. Researchers use genetically engineered "avatars" virtually indistinguishable from the native tool using higher species. A species that appears to be somewhere in the neanderthal stage of advanced evolution.

The base where the research scientists are based is guarded from the hostile plant and animal wildlife by heavily armed space marines and giant auto-turrets that keep the jungle from consuming the facility.

The story (as far as the scriptment goes) is very similar to Robert Charles Wilson's "BIOS" hard sci-fi novel only with more Aliens-esque action.

The "twist" in the story is similar to the idea presented in Solaris, that the entire planet is a living organism with the plants and animals on it either symbiotic or part of the planet's structure. The jungle and it's inhabitants are acting like white blood cells attempting to repel a virus (the human researchers).

The CG from WETA is said to be astoundingly life-like. As big a jump over Gollum and Davy Jones as those characters were over the characters from the Final Fantasy and Hulk (Ang Lee's) movies.

The human sequences are live action. The avatar sequences are 100% CG.

"only two moving parts and MTBF ratings. "

That should read: "only two moving parts and fantastic MTBF ratings."

Ah, but if you are going to do that kind of calculation you then have to factor in the costs of exploration, drilling, refining, transporting, storing, and pumping fossil fuels. Plus the intangibles like the economic impact of gas stations to a local economy; etc. You also need to factor in the costs of locating, mining, and processing battery materials vs their real world life span. One could also include the cost of shipping, storing, and recycling the batteries.

Then you get into the maintenance costs. A modern internal combustion engine and its necessary ancillary components comprise hundreds (if not thousands) of components. Many of them moving, in a caustic environment, and subject to wear. Compare that to a BEV where there are a couple dozen drive components with only two moving parts and MTBF ratings. Switch to electric vehicles and suddenly you are only getting the brakes, tires, and transmission/differential serviced. And with regenerative braking your period between maintenance is greatly extended.

The main advantages of electric vehicles are:

1) 90-95% efficient drive train.
2) Can use any energy storage medium that can be converted into electricity. (flywheels, fuel cells, gasoline powered generators, turbines, batteries; etc).
3) More torque at lower (zero) RPM.
4) Less components to wear out.
5) With BEVs you have a centralized fuel delivery system with a pre-built infrastructure that allows you to increase efficiency/environmental impact for millions of vehicles (assuming everyone is driving one) with a single upgrade over a very short period of time.
6) BEVs can actually help balance a power grid by acting as local storage systems for neighborhood power during periods of peak load and consuming poer at off-peak when that power is otherwise wasted.

The Alamo Drafthouse Village in Austin just had all of its screens upgraded to Sony's 4K DLP projectors. Only the second theater in Texas to offer films in 4K DLP.

Right now only Sony and WB are distributing films in 4K, but everyone else is expected to jump on board soon. The 4K projectors must have some nice scalar chips in them because 2K films seem more impressive displayed on them as well.

There are plenty of headphones with larger circumference ear pads that actually completely contain your ears. For good work sealed can the Seinheiser 280 Pro's are a good choice. Fairly inexpensive at $100 with excellent sound reproduction, large ear pads, and really excellent exterior noise deadening. I use them both at work hooked up to my PC and on plane trips powered by nothing more than my iPod Nano. They work so well at blocking exterior noise that most people ask if they are active noise canceling. Very comfy, too. I have moderately large ears and I've gone for 8+ hours at a stretch with no discomfort.

For semi-open and open cans I really like AKG headphones. My old K501's are still going strong. Sure they ran $350 when brand new, but the sound reproduction is really accurate and they are extremely comfortable (more so than the Seinheisers as they use a fabric covering for the pads rather than imitation leather).

By far the best place for headphone shopping I have found is HeadRoom . Their reviews are spot on and their prices are better than just about anyone else's.

Coal and oil are FAR more efficient and readily available than both batteries and hydrogen cells.

Eh? No they aren't. They have a far greater energy density than current battery technology and hydrogen fuel tanks can provide, but their efficiency is terrible. The reason you get more range out of an internal combustion engine, gasoline powered, vehicle is that, even if the best you can do is 30-40% efficiency, the energy storage density is so great that it counter balances the wastefulness of the combustion process.

The only time coal and oil become moderately efficient is in large scale power plants. On the small scale battery electrics kick the arse out of gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and hydrogen (combustion and fuel cell) powered vehicles in terms of efficiency. At the same time, they allow you to leverage a centralized power system to gain the efficiencies of large scale coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear; etc, power generation sources.

Even better, once you have a cleaner source of mass energy production all the battery electric vehicles out there get an instant end to end efficiency upgrade simply by changing out the centralized power source. Instead of each revolution in power generation requiring hundreds of millions of vehicles to be rotated out of active duty you can make massive gains without any end user doing everything different. This is one of the biggest reasons why we should be pushing BEVs as the successor to the ICE vehicle.

ArenaNet is (and was) a wholly owned subsidiary of NCsoft. It is as much an independent developer as E&G (the guys that did L2) were. The Aion team is no more or less an independent entity than ArenaNet.

CF's are definately still young enough that all bulbs are not equal. As others noted, try to buy the slightly more expensive versions. A good CF is usually about $3 or $4. Avoid the multi-packs available at discount stores. They usually have awful color and absurdly long warm up times. Buy from a store that has a good return policy.. if the bulbs suck, return them.

Avoid using CFs in areas where the bulbs will only be needed for a short time and where immediate light is required (Hallways, stairs). Good CF bulbs still have a warm up time, but they reach about 70% instantly, and 100% within about 5-30seconds.

If you replace no other bulb, swap out your porch light.

I've had mixed luck with Home Depot bulbs, (they have an in store brand). The GE bulbs from Lowe's are great, especially the new "daylight" series bulbs.

The other recommendation is look at replacing the fixture with an actual flourescent fixture. These days you can get fixtures that are CF, but the electronics are in the fixture instead of the bulb base. Since the electronics are only purchased once, they are generally better quality, and the fixtures are brighter and have faster start times. Selection is still pretty limited, but its worth it where ever possible. (Home depot has a $19 14watt CF dusk to dawn outdoor porch light that works great and puts out an incredible amount of light.)